The present invention relates to feeding articles, such as blister packs and the like, to an automatic machine, specifically to a packaging machine.
More in detail, the invention relates to an apparatus for replacement of rejected articles in the feeding line of a packaging machine.
It is known that blister packs, obtained by cutting a band provided with a series of blisters, containing respective products, are transferred from the cutting station of the blistering machine to the feeding line of the packaging machine, which puts the blister packs into suitable boxes.
The blister packs, aligned and regularly spaced apart, are conveyed from the outlet line of the blistering machine to the feeding line of the packaging machine, which are operated continuously.
During transferring of the blister packs to the feeding line of the packaging machine, a printing head, a so-called ink-jet head, usually prints the packages and possible faulty packages are rejected.
Faults can result from e.g. missing or incomplete filling of the blisters or printing errors.
The faulty packages, suitably marked, are removed from the line in a region corresponding to suitable rejection station.
Therefore, in this field there is the problem of replacing the rejected blister packs, so as to fill the empty spaces left by the rejected blister packs in the ordered line, which moves forward to the feeding line of the packaging machine, in order to avoid incomplete filling of the boxes.
The above mentioned problem is solved by the use of replacement devices, which basically substantially include an additional magazine situated above the feeding line of the packaging machine, inside which a group of blister packs is kept in pile.
When a replacement is needed, a blister pack is released from the bottom of the magazine of the replacement device onto the feeding line moving therebelow, to the position previously occupied by the rejected blister pack.
The magazine of the replacement device is filled manually, when it is necessary, by the operator assigned to the machine, who introduces a proper number of piled up blister packs.
The above solution in itself is effective and functional, however it does not ensure the correct replacement of the articles to be packaged, because the feeding of the replacement device is assigned to the manual operation of the operator.
If, for instance, due to any possible reason, the operator does not fill the magazine of the replacement device with the correct blister packs to be packaged, when the kind of production is changed, and does not substitute the remaining blister packs of the previous group, some packages could include blister packs different from those expected.
Obviously, an error of this kind would be particularly serious when pharmaceutical products and the like are packaged, for which high safety requirements must be met during use.
Consequently, the presently used replacement devices cannot ensure a correct feeding of the blister packs to the packaging machine, due to possible human errors.
The object of the present invention is to avoid the above mentioned drawback by proposing an apparatus, which allows automatic replacement of articles such as blister packs, onto the feeding line of the packaging machine, without the necessity for the operator to perform any action during the blister packs loading.
Another object of the present invention is to propose an apparatus, whose structure is very simple as far as construction and operation are concerned, and which is versatile and can be used with different blister packs to be packaged.
The above mentioned objects are obtained, in accordance with the contents of the claims, by an apparatus for replacing rejected articles, in particular blister packs, onto the feeding line of a packaging machine, along which the articles to be packaged are conveyed arranged aligned in a line and regularly spaced apart, including:
an additional magazine situated beside the feeding line for receiving and housing, arranged in a pile, a series of said articles, which are destined to be picked up when necessary to replace the rejected articles;
an elevating member connected to said additional magazine and aimed at controlling the stepwise movement of the means supporting said articles arranged in a pile in suitable step relation with accumulation of the articles inside said additional magazine or with removal of a single article to be fed to said feeding line, from the top of said pile;
a transferring device, situated above said additional magazine and equipped with gripping means, which automatically transfer said series of said articles into said additional magazine, in order to form a pile of said articles, and which pick up single articles from top of said pile in order to replace the rejected articles.